(RHSA-2014:1999) Moderate: mailx security update

The mailx packages contain a mail user agent that is used to manage mail
using scripts.

A flaw was found in the way mailx handled the parsing of email addresses.
A syntactically valid email address could allow a local attacker to cause
mailx to execute arbitrary shell commands through shell meta-characters and
the direct command execution functionality. (CVE-2004-2771, CVE-2014-7844)

Note: Applications using mailx to send email to addresses obtained from
untrusted sources will still remain vulnerable to other attacks if they
accept email addresses which start with “-” (so that they can be confused
with mailx options). To counteract this issue, this update also introduces
the “–” option, which will treat the remaining command line arguments as
email addresses.

All mailx users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
contain backported patches to correct these issues.